As the Tin House Writers Workshop rolls into its homestretch, things should get interesting tonight when fantastic local author Peter Rock interviews Annie Proulx, who will forever be remembered as the author of “Brokeback Mountain” (and of an infantile rant when said movie didnt win Best Picture at the Oscars). But as a winner of a Pulitzer, a National Book Award, and the Pen Faulkner, the breadth of her writing extends far past Jack and Ennis. Prior to Brokeback, she was most famous for the Shipping News, the gripping story of a slouch named Quoyle in Newfoundland. That Old Ace in the Hole is the singular best book I’ve ever read about the Texas Panhandle (that’s a weird sentence to write, but it does occur to me that I’ve read more of those books than the average reader). On the Panhandle, in Newfoundland, and in Brokeback’s Montana, the land is unforgiving and more untamed than we find in most contemporary literature. In these settings, men (amost always men, in Proulx’s books), are set against the land in your freshman English teacher’s favorite theme, man vs. nature.

Pete Rock deals with some of the same themes as Proulx, but he uses wildly different avenues to get there. His books are populated with electricity-obsessed teens, vagrants, skaters, blackjack dealers, and peeping toms. Listening to these two talking shop should be very fascinating, if the rumors of Proulx’s reclusiveness are indeed exaggerated.

Reed College Cerf Aphitheater, 3203 SE Woodstock, 8 pm, $5